The Blog

How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education (*)

PHI DELTA KAPPAN

February 1997

How Not to Teach Values

A Critical Look at Character Education

By Alfie Kohn

Teachers and schools tend to mistake good behavior for good character. What they prize is docility, suggestibility; the child who will do what he is told; or even better, the child who will do what is wanted without even having to be told. They value most in children what children least value in themselves. Small wonder that their effort to build character is such a failure; they don’t know it when they see it.

– John HoltHow Children Fail

Were you to stand somewhere in the continental United States and announce, “I’m going to Hawaii,” it would be understood that you were heading for those islands in the Pacific that collectively constitute the 50th state. Were you to stand in Honolulu and make the same statement, however, you would probably be talking about one specific island in the chain – namely, the big one to your southeast. The word Hawaii would seem to have two meanings, a broad one and a narrow one; we depend on context to tell them apart.

The phrase character education also has two meanings. In the broad sense, it refers to almost anything that schools might try to provide outside of academics, especially when the purpose is to help children grow into good people. In the narrow sense, it denotes a particular style of moral training, one that reflects particular values as well as particular assumptions about the nature of children and how they learn.

Unfortunately, the two meanings of the term have become blurred, with the narrow version of character education dominating the field to the point that it is frequently mistaken for the broader concept. Thus educators who are keen to support children’s social and moral development may turn, by default, to a program with a certain set of methods and a specific agenda that, on reflection, they might very well find objectionable.

My purpose in this article is to subject these programs to careful scrutiny and, in so doing, to highlight the possibility that there are other ways to achieve our broader objectives. I address myself not so much to those readers who are avid proponents of character education (in the narrow sense) but to those who simply want to help children become decent human beings and may not have thought carefully about what they are being offered.

*

Let me get straight to the point. What goes by the name of character education nowadays is, for the most part, a collection of exhortations and extrinsic inducements designed to make children work harder and do what they’re told. Even when other values are also promoted — caring or fairness, say — the preferred method of instruction is tantamount to indoctrination. The point is to drill students in specific behaviors rather than to engage them in deep, critical reflection about certain ways of being. This is the impression one gets from reading articles and books by contemporary proponents of character education as well as the curriculum materials sold by the leading national programs. The impression is only strengthened by visiting schools that have been singled out for their commitment to character education. To wit:

A huge, multiethnic elementary school in Southern California uses a framework created by the Jefferson Center for Character Education. Classes that the principal declares “well behaved” are awarded Bonus Bucks, which can eventually be redeemed for an ice cream party. On an enormous wall near the cafeteria, professionally painted Peanuts characters instruct children: “Never talk in line.” A visitor is led to a fifth-grade classroom to observe an exemplary lesson on the current character education topic. The teacher is telling students to write down the name of the person they regard as the “toughest worker” in school. The teacher then asks them, “How many of you are going to be tough workers?” (Hands go up.) “Can you be a tough worker at home, too?” (Yes.)

A small, almost entirely African American school in Chicago uses a framework created by the Character Education Institute. Periodic motivational assemblies are used to “give children a good pep talk,” as the principal puts it, and to reinforce the values that determine who will be picked as Student of the Month. Rule number one posted on the wall of a kindergarten room is “We will obey the teachers.” Today, students in this class are listening to the story of “Lazy Lion,” who orders each of the other animals to build him a house, only to find each effort unacceptable. At the end, the teacher drives home the lesson: “Did you ever hear Lion say thank you?” (No.) “Did you ever hear Lion say please?” (No.) “It’s good to always say … what?” (Please.) The reason for using these words, she points out, is that by doing so we are more likely to get what we want.

A charter school near Boston has been established specifically to offer an intensive, homegrown character education curriculum to its overwhelmingly white, middle-class student body. At weekly public ceremonies, certain children receive a leaf that will then be hung in the Forest of Virtue. The virtues themselves are “not open to debate,” the headmaster insists, since moral precepts in his view enjoy the same status as mathematical truths. In a first-grade classroom, a teacher is observing that “it’s very hard to be obedient when you want something. I want you to ask yourself ‘Can I have it — and why not?’” She proceeds to ask the students, ” What kinds of things show obedience?” and, after collecting a few suggestions, announces that she’s “not going to call on anyone else now. We could go on forever but we have to have a moment of silence and then a spelling test.”

*

Some of the most popular schoolwide strategies for improving students’ character seem dubious on their face. When President Clinton mentioned the importance of character education in his 1996 State of the Union address, the only specific practice he recommended was requiring students to wear uniforms. The premises here are, first, that children’s character can be improved by forcing them to dress alike, and second, that if adults object to students’ clothing, the best solution is not to invite them to reflect together about how this problem might be solved, but instead to compel them all to wear the same thing.

A second strategy, also consistent with the dominant philosophy of character education, is an exercise that might be called “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Honesty.” Here, one value after another is targeted, with each assigned its own day, week, or month. This seriatim approach is unlikely to result in a lasting commitment to any of these values, much less a feeling for how they may be related. Nevertheless, such programs are taken very seriously by some of the same people who are quick to dismiss other educational programs, such as those intended to promote self-esteem, as silly and ineffective.

Then there is the strategy of offering students rewards when they are “caught” being good, an approach favored by right-wing religious groups[1] and orthodox behaviorists but also by leaders of — and curriculum suppliers for — the character education movement.[2] Because of its popularity and because a sizable body of psychological evidence germane to the topic is available, it is worth lingering on this particular practice for a moment.

In general terms, what the evidence suggests is this: the more we reward people for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. Extrinsic motivation, in other words, is not only quite different from intrinsic motivation but actually tends to erode it.[3] This effect has been demonstrated under many different circumstances and with respect to many different attitudes and behaviors. Most relevant to character education is a series of studies showing that individuals who have been rewarded for doing something nice become less likely to think of themselves as caring or helpful people and more likely to attribute their behavior to the reward.

“Extrinsic incentives can, by undermining self-perceived altruism, decrease intrinsic motivation to help others,” one group of researchers concluded on the basis of several studies. “A person’s kindness, it seems, cannot be bought.”[4] The same applies to a person’s sense of responsibility, fairness, perseverance, and so on. The lesson a child learns from Skinnerian tactics is that the point of being good is to get rewards. No wonder researchers have found that children who are frequently rewarded — or, in another study, children who receive positive reinforcement for caring, sharing, and helping — are less likely than other children to keep doing those things.[5]

In short, it makes no sense to dangle goodies in front of children for being virtuous. But even worse than rewards are awards — certificates, plaques, trophies, and other tokens of recognition whose numbers have been artificially limited so only a few can get them. When some children are singled out as “winners,” the central message that every child learns is this: “Other people are potential obstacles to my success.”[6] Thus the likely result of making students beat out their peers for the distinction of being the most virtuous is not only less intrinsic commitment to virtue but also a disruption of relationships and, ironically, of the experience of community that is so vital to the development of children’s character.

Unhappily, the problems with character education (in the narrow sense, which is how I’ll be using the term unless otherwise indicated) are not restricted to such strategies as enforcing sartorial uniformity, scheduling a value of the week, or offering students a “doggie biscuit” for being good. More deeply troubling are the fundamental assumptions, both explicit and implicit, that inform character education programs. Let us consider five basic questions that might be asked of any such program: At what level are problems addressed? What is the underlying theory of human nature? What is the ultimate goal? Which values are promoted? And finally, How is learning thought to take place?

*

1. At what level are problems addressed? One of the major purveyors of materials in this field, the Jefferson Center for Character Education in Pasadena, California, has produced a video that begins with some arresting images — quite literally. Young people are shown being led away in handcuffs, the point being that crime can be explained on the basis of an “erosion of American core values,” as the narrator intones ominously. The idea that social problems can be explained by the fact that traditional virtues are no longer taken seriously is offered by many proponents of character education as though it were just plain common sense.

But if people steal or rape or kill solely because they possess bad values — that is, because of their personal characteristics — the implication is that political and economic realities are irrelevant and need not be addressed. Never mind staggering levels of unemployment in the inner cities or a system in which more and more of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands; just place the blame on individuals whose characters are deficient. A key tenet of the “Character Counts!” Coalition, which bills itself as a nonpartisan umbrella group devoid of any political agenda, is the highly debatable proposition that “negative social influences can [be] and usually are overcome by the exercise of free will and character.”[7] What is presented as common sense is, in fact, conservative ideology.

Let’s put politics aside, though. If a program proceeds by trying to “fix the kids” — as do almost all brands of character education — it ignores the accumulated evidence from the field of social psychology demonstrating that much of how we act and who we are reflects the situations in which we find ourselves. Virtually all the landmark studies in this discipline have been variations on this theme. Set up children in an extended team competition at summer camp and you will elicit unprecedented levels of aggression. Assign adults to the roles of prisoners or guards in a mock jail, and they will start to become their roles. Move people to a small town, and they will be more likely to rescue a stranger in need. In fact, so common is the tendency to attribute to an individual’s personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment that social psychologists have dubbed this the “fundamental attribution error.”

A similar lesson comes to us from the movement concerned with Total Quality Management associated with the ideas of the late W. Edwards Deming. At the heart of Deming’s teaching is the notion that the “system” of an organization largely determines the results. The problems experienced in a corporation, therefore, are almost always due to systemic flaws rather than to a lack of effort or ability on the part of individuals in that organization. Thus, if we are troubled by the way students are acting, Deming, along with most social psychologists, would presumably have us transform the structure of the classroomrather than try to remake the students themselves — precisely the opposite of the character education approach.

2. What is the view of human nature? Character education’s “fix-the-kids” orientation follows logically from the belief that kids need fixing. Indeed, the movement seems to be driven by a stunningly dark view of children — and, for that matter, of people in general. A “comprehensive approach [to character education] is based on a somewhat dim view of human nature,” acknowledges William Kilpatrick, whose book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong contains such assertions as: “Most behavior problems are the result of sheer ‘willfulness’ on the part of children.”[8]

Despite — or more likely because of — statements like that, Kilpatrick has frequently been invited to speak at character education conferences.[9] But that shouldn’t be surprising in light of how many prominent proponents of character education share his views. Edward Wynne says his own work is grounded in a tradition of thought that takes a “somewhat pessimistic view of human nature.”[10] The idea of character development “sees children as self-centered,” in the opinion of Kevin Ryan, who directs the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University as well as heading up the character education network of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.[11] Yet another writer approvingly traces the whole field back to the bleak world view of Thomas Hobbes: it is “an obvious assumption of character education,” writes Louis Goldman, that people lack the instinct to work together. Without laws to compel us to get along, “our natural egoism would lead us into ‘a condition of warre one against another.’”[12] This sentiment is echoed by F. Washington Jarvis, headmaster of the Roxbury Latin School in Boston, one of Ryan’s favorite examples of what character education should look like in practice. Jarvis sees human nature as “mean, nasty, brutish, selfish, and capable of great cruelty and meanness. We have to hold a mirror up to the students and say, ‘This is who you are. Stop it.’”[13]

Even when proponents of character education don’t express such sentiments explicitly, they give themselves away by framing their mission as a campaign for self-control. Amitai Etzioni, for example, does not merely include this attribute on a list of good character traits; he defines character principally in terms of the capacity “to control impulses and defer gratification.”[14] This is noteworthy because the virtue of self-restraint — or at least the decision to give special emphasis to it — has historically been preached by those, from St. Augustine to the present, who see people as basically sinful.

In fact, at least three assumptions seem to be at work when the need for self-control is stressed: first, that we are all at war not only with others but with ourselves, torn between our desires and our reason (or social norms); second, that these desires are fundamentally selfish, aggressive, or otherwise unpleasant; and third, that these desires are very strong, constantly threatening to overpower us if we don’t rein them in. Collectively, these statements describe religious dogma, not scientific fact. Indeed, the evidence from several disciplines converges to cast doubt on this sour view of human beings and, instead, supports the idea that it is as “natural” for children to help as to hurt. I will not rehearse that evidence here, partly because I have done so elsewhere at some length.[15] Suffice it to say that even the most hardheaded empiricist might well conclude that the promotion of prosocial values consists to some extent of supporting (rather than restraining or controlling) many facets of the self. Any educator who adopts this more balanced position might think twice before joining an educational movement that is finally inseparable from the doctrine of original sin.

3. What is the ultimate goal? It may seem odd even to inquire about someone’s reasons for trying to improve children’s character. But it is worth mentioning that the whole enterprise — not merely the particular values that are favored — is often animated by a profoundly conservative, if not reactionary, agenda. Character education based on “acculturating students to conventional norms of ‘good’ behavior … resonates with neoconservative concerns for social stability,” observed David Purpel.[16] The movement has been described by another critic as a “yearning for some halcyon days of moral niceties and social tranquility.”[17] But it is not merely a social order that some are anxious to preserve (or recover): character education is vital, according to one vocal proponent, because “the development of character is the backbone of the economic system” now in place.[18]

Character education, or any kind of education, would look very different if we began with other objectives – if, for example, we were principally concerned with helping children become active participants in a democratic society (or agents for transforming a society into one that is authentically democratic). It would look different if our top priority were to help students develop into principled and caring members of a community or advocates for social justice. To be sure, these objectives are not inconsistent with the desire to preserve certain traditions, but the point would then be to help children decide which traditions are worth preserving and why, based on these other considerations. That is not at all the same as endorsing anything that is traditional or making the preservation of tradition our primary concern. In short, we want to ask character education proponents what goals they emphasize – and ponder whether their broad vision is compatible with our own.

4. Which values? Should we allow values to be taught in school? The question is about as sensible as asking whether our bodies should be allowed to contain bacteria. Just as humans are teeming with microorganisms, so schools are teeming with values. We can’t see the former because they’re too small; we don’t notice the latter because they’re too similar to the values of the culture at large. Whether or not we deliberately adopt a character or moral education program, we are always teaching values. Even people who insist that they are opposed to values in school usually mean that they are opposed to values other than their own.[19]

And that raises the inevitable question: Which values, or whose, should we teach? It has already become a cliche to reply that this question should not trouble us because, while there may be disagreement on certain issues, such as abortion, all of us can agree on a list of basic values that children ought to have. Therefore, schools can vigorously and unapologetically set about teaching all of those values.

But not so fast. Look at the way character education programs have been designed and you will discover, alongside such unobjectionable items as “fairness” or “honesty,” an emphasis on values that are, again, distinctly conservative – and, to that extent, potentially controversial. To begin with, the famous Protestant work ethic is prominent: children should learn to “work hard and complete their tasks well and promptly, even when they do not want to,” says Ryan.[20] Here the Latin question Cui bono? comes to mind. Who benefits when people are trained not to question the value of what they have been told to do but simply to toil away at it – and to regard this as virtuous?[21] Similarly, when Wynne defines the moral individual as someone who is not only honest but also “diligent, obedient, and patriotic,”[22] readers may find themselves wondering whether these traits really qualify as moral — as well as reflecting on the virtues that are missing from this list.

Character education curricula also stress the importance of things like “respect,” “responsibility,” and “citizenship.” But these are slippery terms, frequently used as euphemisms for uncritical deference to authority. Under the headline “The Return of the ‘Fourth R’” –referring to “respect, responsibility, or rules” – a news magazine recently described the growing popularity of such practices as requiring uniforms, paddling disobedient students, rewarding those who are compliant, and “throwing disruptive kids out of the classroom.”[23] Indeed, William Glasser observed some time ago that many educators “teach thoughtless conformity to school rules and call the conforming child ‘responsible.’”[24] I once taught at a high school where the principal frequently exhorted students to “take responsibility.” By this he meant specifically that they should turn in their friends who used drugs.

Exhorting students to be “respectful” or rewarding them if they are caught being “good” may likewise mean nothing more than getting them to do whatever the adults demand. Following a lengthy article about character education in the New York Times Magazine, a reader mused, “Do you suppose that if Germany had had character education at the time, it would have encouraged children to fight Nazism or to support it?”[25] The more time I spend in schools that are enthusiastically implementing character education programs, the more I am haunted by that question.

In place of the traditional attributes associated with character education, Deborah Meier and Paul Schwarz of the Central Park East Secondary School in New York nominated two core values that a school might try to promote: “empathy and skepticism: the ability to see a situation from the eyes of another and the tendency to wonder about the validity of what we encountered.”[26] Anyone who brushes away the question “Which values should be taught?” might speculate on the concrete differences between a school dedicated to turning out students who are empathic and skeptical and a school dedicated to turning out students who are loyal, patriotic, obedient, and so on.

Meanwhile, in place of such personal qualities as punctuality or perseverance, we might emphasize the cultivation of autonomy so that children come to experience themselves as “origins” rather than “pawns,” as one researcher put it.[27] We might, in other words, stress self-determination at least as much as self-control. With such an agenda, it would be crucial to give students the chance to participate in making decisions about their learning and about how they want their classroom to be.[28] This stands in sharp contrast to a philosophy of character education like Wynne’s, which decrees that “it is specious to talk about student choices” and offers students no real power except for when we give “some students authority over other students (for example, hall guard, class monitor).”[29]

Even with values that are widely shared, a superficial consensus may dissolve when we take a closer look. Educators across the spectrum are concerned about excessive attention to self-interest and are committed to helping students transcend a preoccupation with their own needs. But how does this concern play out in practice? For some of us, it takes the form of an emphasis on compassion; for the dominant character education approach, the alternative value to be stressed is loyalty, which is, of course, altogether different.[30] Moreover, as John Dewey remarked at the turn of the century, anyone seriously troubled about rampant individualism among children would promptly target for extinction the “drill-and-skill” approach to instruction: “The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness.”[31] Yet conservative champions of character education are often among the most outspoken supporters of a model of teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and the sequential acquisition of decontextualized skills.

Or take another example: all of us may say we endorse the idea of “cooperation,” but what do we make of the practice of setting groups against one another in a quest for triumph, such that cooperation becomes the means and victory is the end? On the one hand, we might find this even more objectionable than individual competition. (Indeed, we might regard a “We’re Number One!” ethic as a reason for schools to undertake something like character education in the first place.) On the other hand, “school-to-school, class-to-class, or row-to-row academic competitions” actually have been endorsed as part of a character education program,[32] along with contests that lead to awards for things like good citizenship.

The point, once again, is that it is entirely appropriate to ask which values a character education program is attempting to foster, notwithstanding the ostensible lack of controversy about a list of core values. It is equally appropriate to put such a discussion in context — specifically, in the context of which values are currently promoted in schools. The fact is that schools are already powerful socializers of traditional values — although, as noted above, we may fail to appreciate the extent to which this is true because we have come to take these values for granted. In most schools, for example, students are taught — indeed, compelled — to follow the rules regardless of whether the rules are reasonable and to respect authority regardless of whether that respect has been earned. (This process isn’t always successful, of course, but that is a different matter.) Students are led to accept competition as natural and desirable, and to see themselves more as discrete individuals than as members of a community. Children in American schools are even expected to begin each day by reciting a loyalty oath to the Fatherland, although we call it by a different name. In short, the question is not whether to adopt the conservative values offered by most character education programs, but whether we want to consolidate the conservative values that are already in place.

5. What is the theory of learning? We come now to what may be the most significant, and yet the least remarked on, feature of character education: the way values are taught and the way learning is thought to take place.

The character education coordinator for the small Chicago elementary school also teaches second grade. In her classroom, where one boy has been forced to sit by himself for the last two weeks (“He’s kind of pesty”), she is asking the children to define tolerance. When the teacher gets the specific answers she is fishing for, she exclaims, “Say that again,” and writes down only those responses. Later comes the moral: “If somebody doesn’t think the way you think, should you turn them off?” (No.)

Down the hall, the first-grade teacher is fishing for answers on a different subject. “When we play games, we try to understand the — what?” (Rules.) A moment later, the children scramble to get into place so she will pick them to tell a visitor their carefully rehearsed stories about conflict resolution. Almost every child’s account, narrated with considerable prompting by the teacher, concerns name-calling or some other unpleasant incident that was “correctly” resolved by finding an adult. The teacher never asks the children how they felt about what happened or invites them to reflect on what else might have been done. She wraps up the activity by telling the children, “What we need to do all the time is clarify – make it clear – to the adult what you did.”

The schools with character education programs that I have visited are engaged largely in exhortation and directed recitation. At first one might assume this is due to poor implementation of the programs on the part of individual educators. But the program themselves — and the theorists who promote them — really do seem to regard teaching as a matter of telling and compelling. For example, the broad-based “Character Counts!” Coalition offers a framework of six core character traits and then asserts that “young people should be specifically and repeatedly told what is expected of them.” The leading providers of curriculum materials walk teachers through highly structured lessons in which character-related concepts are described and then students are drilled until they can produce the right answers.

Teachers are encouraged to praise children who respond correctly, and some programs actually include multiple-choice tests to ensure that students have learned their values. For example, here are two sample test questions prepared for teachers by the Character Education Institute, based in San Antonio, Texas: “Having to obey rules and regulations (a) gives everyone the same right to be an individual, (b) forces everyone to do the same thing at all times, (c) prevents persons from expressing their individually [sic]”; and “One reason why parents might not allow their children freedom of choice is (a) children are always happier when they are told what to do and when to do it, (b) parents aren’t given a freedom of choice; therefore, children should not be given a choice either, (c) children do not always demonstrate that they are responsible enough to be given a choice.” The correct answers, according to the answer key, are (a) and (c) respectively.

The Character Education Institute recommends “engaging the students in discussions,” but only discussions of a particular sort: “Since the lessons have been designed to logically guide the students to the right answers, the teacher should allow the students to draw their own conclusions. However, if the students draw the wrong conclusion, the teacher is instructed to tell them why their conclusion is wrong.”[33]

Students are told what to think and do, not only by their teachers but by highly didactic stories, such as those in the Character Education Institute’s “Happy Life” series, which end with characters saying things like “I am glad that I did not cheat,” or “Next time I will be helpful,” or “I will never be selfish again.” Most character education programs also deliver homilies by way of posters and banners and murals displayed throughout the school. Children who do as they are told are presented with all manner of rewards, typically in front of their peers.

Does all of this amount to indoctrination? Absolutely, says Wynne, who declares that “school is and should and must be inherently indoctrinative.”[34] Even when character education proponents tiptoe around that word, their model of instruction is clear: good character and values are instilled in or transmitted to students. We are “planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young,” says William Bennett.[35] The virtues or values in question are fully formed, and, in the minds of many character education proponents, divinely ordained. The children are — pick your favorite metaphor — so many passive receptacles to be filled, lumps of clay to be molded, pets to be trained, or computers to be programmed.

Thus, when we see Citizen-of-the-Month certificates and “Be a good sport!” posters, when we find teachers assigning preachy stories and principals telling students what to wear, it is important that we understand what is going on. These techniques may appear merely innocuous or gimmicky; they may strike us as evidence of a scattershot, let’s-try-anything approach. But the truth is that these are elements of a systematic pedagogical philosophy. They are manifestations of a model that sees children as objects to be manipulated rather than as learners to be engaged.

Ironically, some people who accept character education without a second thought are quite articulate about the bankruptcy of this model when it comes to teaching academic subjects. Plenty of teachers have abandoned the use of worksheets, textbooks, and lectures that fill children full of disconnected facts and skills. Plenty of administrators are working to create schools where students can actively construct meaning around scientific and historical and literary concepts. Plenty of educators, in short, realize that memorizing right answers and algorithms doesn’t help anyone to arrive at a deep understanding of ideas.

And so we are left scratching our heads. Why would all these people, who know that the “transmission” model fails to facilitate intellectual development, uncritically accept the very same model to promote ethical development? How could they understand that mathematical truths cannot be shoved down students’ throats but then participate in a program that essentially tries to shove moral truths down the same throats? In the case of individual educators, the simple answer may be that they missed the connection. Perhaps they just failed to recognize that “a classroom cannot foster the development of autonomy in the intellectual realm while suppressing it in the social and moral realms,” as Constance Kamii and her colleagues put it not long ago.[36]

In the case of the proponents of character education, I believe the answer to this riddle is quite different. The reason they are promoting techniques that seem strikingly ineffective at fostering autonomy or ethical development is that, as a rule, they are not trying to foster autonomy or ethical development. The goal is not to support or facilitate children’s social and moral growth, but simply to “demand good behavior from students” in Ryan’s words.[37] The idea is to get compliance, to make children act the way we want them to.

Indeed, if these are the goals, then the methods make perfect sense — the lectures and pseudo-discussions, the slogans and the stories that conk students on the head with their morals. David Brooks, who heads the Jefferson Center for Character Education, frankly states, “We’re in the advertising business.” The way you get people to do something, whether it’s buying Rice Krispies or becoming trustworthy, is to “encourage conformity through repeated messages.”[38] The idea of selling virtues like cereal nearly reaches the point of self-parody in the Jefferson Center’s curriculum, which includes the following activity: “There’s a new product on the market! It’s Considerate Cereal. Eating it can make a person more considerate. Design a label for the box. Tell why someone should buy and eat this cereal. Then list the ingredients.”[39]

If “repeated messages” don’t work, then you simply force students to conform: “Sometimes compulsion is what is needed to get a habit started,” says William Kilpatrick.[40] We may recoil from the word “compulsion,” but it is the premise of that sentence that really ought to give us pause. When education is construed as the process of inculcating habits –– which is to say, unreflective actions – then it scarcely deserves to be called education at all. It is really, as Alan Lockwood saw, an attempt to get “mindless conformity to externally imposed standards of conduct.”[41]

Notice how naturally this goal follows from a dark view of human nature. If you begin with the premise that “good conduct is not our natural first choice,” then the best you can hope for is “the development of good habits”[42] — that is, a system that gets people to act unthinkingly in the manner that someone else has deemed appropriate. This connection recently became clear to Ann Medlock, whose Giraffe Project was designed to evoke “students’ own courage and compassion” in thinking about altruism, but which, in some schools, was being turned into a traditional, authoritarian program in which students were simply told how to act and what to believe. Medlock recalls suddenly realizing what was going on with these educators: “Oh, I see where you’re coming from. You believe kids are no damn good!”[43]

The character education movement’s emphasis on habit, then, is consistent with its view of children. Likewise, its process matches its product. The transmission model, along with the use of rewards and punishments to secure compliance, seems entirely appropriate if the values you are trying to transmit are things like obedience and loyalty and respect for authority. But this approach overlooks an important distinction between product and process. When we argue about which traits to emphasize — compassion or loyalty, cooperation or competition, skepticism or obedience — we are trafficking in value judgments. When we talk about how best to teach these things, however, we are being descriptive rather than just prescriptive. Even if you like the sort of virtues that appear in character education programs, and even if you regard the need to implement those virtues as urgent, the attempt to transmit or instill them dooms the project because that is just not consistent with the best theory and research on how people learn. (Of course, if you have reservations about many of the values that the character educators wish to instill, you may be relieved that their favored method is unlikely to be successful.)

I don’t wish to be misunderstood. The techniques of character education may succeed in temporarily buying a particular behavior. But they are unlikely to leave children with a commitment to that behavior, a reason to continue acting that way in the future. You can turn out automatons who utter the desired words or maybe even “emit” (to use the curious verb favored by behaviorists) the desired actions. But the words and actions are unlikely to continue — much less transfer to new situations — because the child has not been invited to integrate them into his or her value structure. As Dewey observed, “The required beliefs cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on.”[44] Yet watch a character education lesson in any part of the country and you will almost surely be observing a strenuous exercise in hammering and plastering.

For traditional moralists, the constructivist approach is a waste of time. If values and traditions and the stories that embody them already exist, then surely “we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” remarks Bennett.[45] Likewise an exasperated Wynne: “Must each generation try to completely reinvent society?”[46] The answer is no – and yes. It is not as though everything that now exists must be discarded and entirely new values fashioned from scratch. But the process of learning does indeed require that meaning, ethical or otherwise, be actively invented and reinvented, from the inside out. It requires that children be given the opportunity to make sense of such concepts as fairness or courage, regardless of how long the concepts themselves have been around. Children must be invited to reflect on complex issues, to recast them in light of their own experiences and questions, to figure out for themselves — and with one another — what kind of person one ought to be, which traditions are worth keeping, and how to proceed when two basic values seem to be in conflict.[47]

In this sense, reinvention is necessary if we want to help children become moral people, as opposed to people who merely do what they are told — or reflexively rebel against what they are told. In fact, as Rheta DeVries and Betty Zan add (in a recent book that offers a useful antidote to traditional character education), “If we want children to resist [peer pressure] and not be victims of others’ ideas, we have to educate children to think for themselves about all ideas, including those of adults.”[48]

Traditionalists are even more likely to offer another objection to the constructivist approach, one that boils down to a single epithet: relativism! If we do anything other than insert moral absolutes in students, if we let them construct their own meanings, then we are saying that anything goes, that morality collapses into personal preferences. Without character education, our schools will just offer programs such as Values Clarification, in which adults are allegedly prohibited from taking a stand.

In response, I would offer several observations. First, the Values Clarification model of moral education, popular in some circles a generation ago, survives today mostly in the polemics of conservatives anxious to justify an indoctrinative approach. Naturally, no statistics are ever cited as to the number of school districts still telling students that any value is as good as any other – assuming the program actually said that in the first place.[49] Second, conservative critics tendentiously try to connect constructivism to relativism, lumping together the work of the late Lawrence Kohlberg with programs like Values Clarification.[50] The truth is that Kohlberg, while opposed to what he called the “bag of virtues” approach to moral education, was not much enamored of Values Clarification either, and he spent a fair amount of time arguing against relativism in general.[51]

If Kohlberg can fairly be criticized, it is for emphasizing moral reasoning, a cognitive process, to the extent that he may have slighted the affective components of morality, such as caring. But the traditionalists are not much for the latter either: caring is seen as an easy or soft virtue (Ryan) that isn’t sufficiently “binding or absolute” (Kilpatrick). The objection to constructivism is not that empathy is eclipsed by justice, but that children – or even adults – should not have an active role to play in making decisions and reflecting on how to live. They should be led instead to an uncritical acceptance of ready-made truths. The character educator’s job, remember, is to elicit the right answer from students and tell those who see things differently “why their conclusion is wrong.“Any deviation from this approach is regarded as indistinguishable from full-blown relativism; we must “plant” traditional values in each child or else morality is nothing more than a matter of individual taste. Such either/or thinking, long since discarded by serious moral philosophers,[52] continues to fuel character education and to perpetuate the confusion of education with indoctrination.

To say that students must construct meaning around moral concepts is not to deny that adults have a crucial role to play. The romantic view that children can basically educate themselves so long as grownups don’t interfere is not taken seriously by any constructivists I know of – certainly not by Dewey, Piaget, Kohlberg, or their followers. Rather, like Values Clarification, this view seems to exist principally as a straw man in the arguments of conservatives. Let there be no question, then: educators, parents, and other adults are desperately needed to offer guidance, to act as models (we hope), to pose challenges that promote moral growth, and to help children understand the effects of their actions on other people, thereby tapping and nurturing a concern for others that is present in children from a very young age.[53]

*

Character education rests on three ideological legs: behaviorism, conservatism, and religion. Of these, the third raises the most delicate issues for a critic; it is here that the charge of ad hominem argument is most likely to be raised. So let us be clear: it is of no relevance that almost all of the leading proponents of character education are devout Catholics. But it is entirely relevant that, in the shadows of their writings, there lurks the assumption that only religion can serve as the foundation for good character. (William Bennett, for example, has flatly asserted that the difference between right and wrong cannot be taught “without reference to religion.”)[54] It is appropriate to consider the personal beliefs of these individuals if those beliefs are ensconced in the movement they have defined and directed. What they do on Sundays is their own business, but if they are trying to turn our public schools into Sunday schools, that becomes everybody’s business.

Even putting aside the theological underpinnings of the character education movement, the five questions presented in this article can help us describe the natural constituency of that movement. Logically, its supporters should be those who firmly believe that we should focus our efforts on repairing the characters of children rather than on transforming the environments in which they learn, those who assume the worst about human nature, those who are more committed to preserving than to changing our society, those who favor such values as obedience to authority, and those who define learning as the process of swallowing whole a set of preexisting truths. It stands to reason that readers who recognize themselves in this description would enthusiastically endorse character education in its present form.

The rest of us have a decision to make. Either we define our efforts to promote children’s social and moral development as an alternative to “character education,” thereby ceding that label to the people who have already appropriated it, or we try to reclaim the wider meaning of the term by billing what we are doing as a different kind of character education.

The first choice – opting out – seems logical: it strains the language to use a single phrase to describe practices as different as engaging students in reflecting about fairness, on the one hand, and making students dress alike, on the other. It seems foolish to pretend that these are just different versions of the same thing, and thus it may be unreasonable to expect someone with a constructivist or progressive vision to endorse what is now called character education. The problem with abandoning this label, however, is that it holds considerable appeal for politicians and members of the public at large. It will be challenging to explain that “character education” is not synonymous with helping children to grow into good people and, indeed, that the movement associated with the term is a good deal more controversial than it first appears.

The second choice, meanwhile, presents its own set of practical difficulties. Given that the individuals and organizations mentioned in this article have succeeded in putting their own stamp on character education, it will not be easy to redefine the phrase so that it can also signify a very different approach. It will not be easy, that is, to organize conferences, publish books and articles, and develop curricular materials that rescue the broad meaning of “character education.”

Whether we relinquish or retain the nomenclature, though, it is vital that we work to decouple most of what takes place under the banner of “character education” from the enterprise of helping students become ethically sophisticated decision makers and caring human beings. Wanting young people to turn out that way doesn’t require us to adopt traditional character education programs any more than wanting them to be physically fit requires us to turn schools into Marine boot camps.

What does the alternative look like? Return once more to those five questions: in each case, an answer different from that given by traditional character education will help us to sketch the broad contours of a divergent approach. More specifically, we should probably target certain practices for elimination, add some new ones, and reconfigure still others that already exist. I have already offered a catalogue of examples of what to eliminate, from Skinnerian reinforcers to lesson plans that resemble sermons. As examples of what to add, we might suggest holding regular class meetings in which students can share, plan, decide, and reflect together.[55] We might also provide children with explicit opportunities to practice “perspective taking” – that is, imagining how the world looks from someone else’s point of view. Activities that promote an understanding of how others think and feel, that support the impulse to imaginatively reach beyond the self, can provide the same benefits realized by holding democratic class meetings – namely, helping students become more ethical and compassionate while simultaneously fostering intellectual growth.[56]

A good example of an existing practice that might be reconfigured is the use of literature to teach values. In principle, the idea is splendid: it makes perfect sense to select stories that not only help students develop reading skills (and an appreciation for good writing) but also raise moral issues. The trouble is that many programs use simplistic little morality tales in place of rich, complex literature. Naturally, the texts should be developmentally appropriate, but some character educators fail to give children credit for being able to grapple with ambiguity. (Imagine the sort of stories likely to be assigned by someone who maintains that “it is ridiculous to believe children are capable of objectively assessing most of the beliefs and values they must absorb to be effective adults.”[57])

Perhaps the concern is not that students will be unable to make sense of challenging literature, but that they will not derive the “correct” moral. This would account for the fact that even when character education curricula include impressive pieces of writing, the works tend to be used for the purpose of drumming in simple lessons. As Kilpatrick sees it, a story “points to these [characters] and says in effect, ‘Act like this; don’t act like that.’”[58] This kind of lesson often takes the form of hero worship, with larger-than-life characters — or real historical figures presented with their foibles airbrushed away — held up to students to encourage imitation of their actions.

Rather than employ literature to indoctrinate or induce mere conformity, we can use it to spur reflection. Whether the students are 6-year-olds or 16-year-olds, the discussion of stories should be open-ended rather than relentlessly didactic. Teachers who refrain from tightly controlling such conversations are impressed again and again by the levels of meaning students prove capable of exploring and the moral growth they exhibit in such an environment. Instead of announcing, “This man is a hero; do what he did,” such teachers may involve the students in deciding who (if anyone) is heroic in a given story – or in contemporary culture[59] – and why. They may even invite students to reflect on the larger issue of whether it is desirable to have heroes. (Consider the quality of discussion that might be generated by asking older students to respond to the declaration of playwright Bertolt Brecht: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”)

*

More than specific practices that might be added, subtracted, or changed, a program to help children grow into good people begins with a commitment to change the way classrooms and schools are structured – and this brings us back to the idea of transcending a fix-the-kid approach. Consider the format of classroom discussions. A proponent of character education, invoking such traditional virtues as patience or self-control, might remind students that they must wait to be recognized by the teacher. But what if we invited students to think about the best way to conduct a discussion? Must we raise our hands? Is there another way to avoid having everyone talk at once? How can we be fair to those who aren’t as assertive or as fast on their feet? Should the power to decide who can speak always rest with the teacher? Perhaps the problem is not with students who need to be more self-disciplined, but with the whole instructional design that has students waiting to be recognized to answer someone else’s questions. And perhaps the real learning comes only when students have the chance to grapple with such issues.

One more example. A proponent of character education says we must make students understand that it is wrong to lie; we need to teach them about the importance of being honest. But why do people lie? Usually because they don’t feel safe enough to tell the truth. The real challenge for us as educators is to examine that precept in terms of what is going on in our classrooms, to ask how we and the students together can make sure that even unpleasant truths can be told and heard. Does pursuing this line of inquiry mean that it’s acceptable to fib? No. It means the problem has to be dissected and solved from the inside out. It means behaviors occur in a context that teachers have helped to establish; therefore, teachers have to examine (and consider modifying) that context even at the risk of some discomfort to themselves. In short, if we want to help children grow into compassionate and responsible people, we have to change the way the classroom works and feels, not just the way each separate member of that class acts. Our emphasis should not be on forming individual characters so much as on transforming educational structures.

Happily, programs do exist whose promotion of children’s social and moral development is grounded in a commitment to change the culture of schools. The best example of which I am aware is the Child Development Project, an elementary school program designed, implemented, and researched by the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, California. The CDP’s premise is that, by meeting children’s needs, we increase the likelihood that they will care about others. Meeting their needs entails, among other things, turning schools into caring communities. The CDP offers the additional advantages of a constructivist vision of learning, a positive view of human nature, a balance of cognitive and affective concerns, and a program that is integrated into all aspects of school life (including the curriculum).[60]

Is the CDP an example of what character education ought to be – or of what ought to replace character education? The answer to that question will depend on tactical, and even semantic, considerations. Far more compelling is the need to reevaluate the practices and premises of contemporary character education. To realize a humane and progressive vision for children’s development, we may need to look elsewhere.

2. See, for example, Kevin Ryan, “The Ten Commandments of Character Education,” School Administrator, September 1995, p. 19; and program materials from the Character Education Institute and the Jefferson Center for Character Education.

7. This statement is taken from an eight-page brochure produced by the “Character Counts!” Coalition, a project of the Josephson Institute of Ethics. Members of the coalition include the American Federation of Teachers, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the American Red Cross, the YMCA, and many other organizations.

12. Louis Goldman, “Mind, Character, and the Deferral of Gratification,” Educational Forum, vol. 60, 1996, p. 136. As part of “educational reconstruction,” he goes on to say, we must “connect the lower social classes to the middle classes who may provide role models for self-discipline” (p. 139).

15. See Alfie Kohn, The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1990); and “Caring Kids: The Role of the Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan, March 1991, pp. 496-506.

17. This description of the character education movement is offered by Alan L. Lockwood in “Character Education: The Ten Percent Solution,” Social Education, April/May 1991, p. 246. It is a particularly apt characterization of a book like Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong, which invokes an age of “chivalry” and sexual abstinence, a time when moral truths were uncomplicated and unchallenged. The author’s tone, however, is not so much wistful about the past as angry about the present: he denounces everything from rock music (which occupies an entire chapter in a book about morality) and feminism to the “multiculturalists” who dare to remove “homosexuality from the universe of moral judgment” (p. 126).

18. Kevin Walsh of the University of Alabama is quoted in Eric N. Berg, “Argument Grows That Teaching of Values Should Rank with Lessons,” New York Times, 1 January 1992, p. 32.

19. I am reminded of a woman in a Houston audience who heatedly informed me that she doesn’t send her child to school “to learn to be nice.” That, she declared, would be “social engineering.” But a moment later this woman added that her child ought to be “taught to respect authority.” Since this would seem to be at least as apposite an example of social engineering, one is led to conclude that the woman’s real objection was to the teaching of particular topics or values.

21. Telling students to “try hard” and “do their best” begs the important questions. How, exactly, do they do their best? Surely it is not just a matter of blind effort. And why should they do so, particularly if the task is not engaging or meaningful to them, or if it has simply been imposed on them? Research has found that the attitudes students take toward learning are heavily influenced by whether they have been led to attribute their success (or failure) to innate ability, to effort, or to other factors – and that traditional classroom practices such as grading and competition lead them to explain the results in terms of ability (or its absence) and to minimize effort whenever possible. What looks like “laziness” or insufficient perseverance, in other words, often turns out to be a rational decision to avoid challenge; it is rational because this route proves most expedient for performing well or maintaining an image of oneself as smart. These systemic factors, of course, are complex and often threatening for educators to address; it is much easier just to impress on children the importance of doing their best and then blame them for lacking perseverance if they seem not to do so.

25. Marc Desmond’s letter appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 21 May 1995, p. 14. The same point was made by Robert Primack, “No Substitute for Critical Thinking: A Response to Wynne,” Educational Leadership, December 1985/January 1986, p. 12.

29. The quotations are from Wynne, “The Great Tradition,” p. 9; and Edward A. Wynne and Herbert J. Walberg, “The Complementary Goals of Character Development and Academic Excellence,” Educational Leadership, December 1985/January 1986, p. 17. William Kilpatrick is equally averse to including students in decision making; he speaks longingly of the days when “schools were unapologetically authoritarian,” declaring that “schools can learn a lot from the Army,” which is a “hierarchial [sic], authoritarian, and undemocratic institution” (see Why Johnny Can’t, p. 228).

30. The sort of compassion I have in mind is akin to what the psychologist Ervin Staub described as a “prosocial orientation” (see his Positive Social Behavior and Morality, vols. 1 and 2 [New York: Academic Press, 1978 and 1979]) – a generalized inclination to care, share, and help across different situations and with different people, including those we don’t know, don’t like, and don’t look like. Loyally lending a hand to a close friend is one thing; going out of one’s way for a stranger is something else.

31. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900; reprint, 1990), p. 15.

32. Wynne and Walberg, p. 17. For another endorsement of competition among students, see Kevin Ryan, “In Defense,” p. 15.

33. This passage is taken from page 21 of an undated 28-page “Character Education Curriculum” produced by the Character Education Institute. Emphasis in original.

34. Wynne, “Great Tradition,” p. 9. Wynne and other figures in the character education movement acknowledge their debt to the French social scientist Emile Durkheim, who believed that “all education is a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling, and acting which he could not have arrived at spontaneously… We exert pressure upon him in order that he may learn proper consideration for others, respect for customs and conventions, the need for work, etc.” (See Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method [New York: Free Press, 1938], p. 6.)

35. This is from Bennett’s introduction to The Book of Virtues (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 12-13.

38. The second quotation is a reporter’s paraphrase of Brooks. Both it and the direct quotation preceding it appear in Philip Cohen, “The Content of Their Character: Educators Find New Ways to Tackle Values and Morality,” ASCD Curriculum Update, Spring 1995, p. 4.

41. To advocate this sort of enterprise, he adds, is to “caricature the moral life.” See Alan L. Lockwood, “Keeping Them in the Courtyard: A Response to Wynne,” Educational Leadership, December 1985/January 1986, p. 10.

49. For an argument that critics tend to misrepresent what Values Clarification was about, see James A. Beane, Affect in the Curriculum (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), pp. 104-6.

50. Wynne, for example, refers to the developers of Values Clarification as “popularizers” of Kohlberg’s research (see “Character and Academics,” p. 141), while Amitai Etzioni, in the course of criticizing Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s work, asserts that “a typical course on moral reasoning starts with something called ‘values clarification’” (see The Spirit of Community, p. 98).

51. Kohlberg’s model, which holds that people across cultures progress predictably through six stages of successively more sophisticated styles of moral reasoning, is based on the decidedly nonrelativistic premise that the last stages are superior to the first ones. See his Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), especially the essays titled “Indoctrination Versus Relativity in Value Education” and “From Is to Ought.“

53. Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health have summarized the available research as follows: “Even children as young as 2 years old have (a) the cognitive capacity to interpret the physical and psychological states of others, (b) the emotional capacity to effectively experience the other’s state, and (c) the behavioral repertoire that permits the possibility of trying to alleviate discomfort in others. These are the capabilities that, we believe, underlie children’s caring behavior in the presence of another person’s distress…. Young children seem to show patterns of moral internalization that are not simply fear based or solely responsive to parental commands. Rather, there are signs that children feel responsible for (as well as connected to and dependent on) others at a very young age.” (See Carolyn Zahn-Waxler et al., “Development of Concern for Others,” Developmental Psychology, vol. 28, 1992, pp. 127, 135. For more on the adult’s role in light of these facts, see Kohn, The Brighter Side.)

56. For more on the theory and research of perspective taking, see Kohn, The Brighter Side, chaps. 4-5; for practical classroom activities for promoting perspective-taking skills, see Norma Deitch Feshbach et al., Learning to Care: Classroom Activities for Social and Affective Development (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1983). While specialists in the field distinguish between perspective taking (imagining what others see, think, or feel) and empathy (feeling what others feel), most educators who talk about the importance of helping children become empathic really seem to be talking about perspective taking.

57. Wynne, “Great Tradition,” p. 9.

58. Kilpatrick, p. 141.

59. It is informative to discover whom the proponents of a hero-based approach to character education themselves regard as heroic. For example, William Bennett’s nominee for “possibly our greatest living American” is Rush Limbaugh. (See Terry Eastland, “Rush Limbaugh: Talking Back,” American Spectator, September 1992, p. 23.)

60. See Victor Battistich et al., “The Child Development Project: A Comprehensive Program for the Development of Prosocial Character,” in William M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz, eds., Moral Behavior and Development: Advances in Theory, Research, and Applications (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1989); and Daniel Solomon et al., “Creating a Caring Community: Educational Practices That Promote Children’s Prosocial Development,” in Fritz K. Oser, Andreas Dick, and Jean-Luc Patry, eds., Effective and Responsible Teaching (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992). For more information about the CDP program or about the research substantiating its effects, write the Developmental Studies Center at 2000 Embarcadero, Suite 305, Oakland, CA 94606.